Film review: Tropic Thunder

Ben Stiller's star-studded send-up of super-sized Hollywood egos goes out of its way to upset as many minorities as possible, says Sukhdev Sandhu

Tropic Thunder is a film about filmmaking. More than that, it's a film about size.

It's a send-up of inflated, corpulent, grandiose Hollywood: its more-is-better philosophy; the super-sized egos of its actors and directors and executives; the imperialism of its production shoots.

A send-up rather than a satire, it's not half as savage as it appears and perhaps even ought to be. That's no surprise. After all, its cast list, including Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr, Jack Black and Tom Cruise, is itself super-sized. These are guys who have done well from Hollywood. They're not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

Ben Stiller, directing his first feature since Zoolander (2001) from a script he co-wrote with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, plays action hero Tugg Speedman whose career is in decline.

He signs on to play the lead role in an idiotically gung-ho Vietnam epic that recalls Apocalypse Now or The Deer Hunter.Problems rack up.

The film's director is flustered Englishman Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), who is struggling to control his tetchy, competitive cast members.

These include Jeff Portnoy (Black), a coke-addicted comedian who had a huge hit as a mega-farter in "Fatties: Part III"; Kirk Lazarus (Downey Jr), a white Aussie so wedded to Method-acting that he has had "pigmentation-alteration procedure" surgery to make him a black GI; Alpa Chino (Brandon T Jackson), a black rapper who has made a mint by peddling an energy drink called Booty Sweat that helps those who buy it "tap into some ass".

Desperate to prove to the squabbling actors that he's the boss, Coogan takes them away from the set, helicopters them to the middle of a jungle, and tells them he's going to shoot their performances guerrilla-style.

The thing is, the jungle's controlled by an Asian drugs cartel whose real guerrillas attack the film crew. Speedman is captured, leaving the motley gang to try to rescue him.

As an adventure drama, which the film sometimes seems to think it can pass itself off as, Tropic Thunder is tame stuff. Where it scores is in the quality of its performances and in its reckless desire to risk offending as many minorities as possible.

It'll be especially interesting to see what effect Cruise's caricature of a Jewish studio boss, its vicious intensity recalling his turn in Magnolia, has on his commercial standing.

But Downey Jr is the unquestionable star. He not only embraces the absurdity of his character, but takes it to such an extreme that he becomes weirdly real and affecting. Lazarus stands tall, flexing his chest like a Black Power security guard, and coming on like a parody of blaxploitation-era negritude: "Hot damn", "Hell yeah, huh", "We're cool!"

The scenes in which he, in all earnestness, bickers with Chino over which of them is blackest, or chides Speedman for using the phrase "you people", are as rich in their multi-layered takes on racial niceties as anything since the first Ali G series.

The film brims with quotable lines: Lazarus, asked by another actor about his commitment to the Method, replies, "I don't drop character until I've done the DVD commentary"; "I don't read scripts; scripts read me".

There is also an exchange in which Lazarus tells Speedman how much he enjoyed his lead role in the film "Simple Jack". "You went full retard, man. Everyone knows you never go full retard." It has earned Stiller flak from disability-rights activists. They shouldn't be so bothered. The real joke is on sappy tearjerkers such as Forrest Gump and I Am Sam.

It's also on Oscar voters who, according to Lazarus, fetishise only the most sentimental depictions of outsiders and simpletons.

Tropic Thunder is, almost necessarily, a hit-and-miss affair. Its targets certainly seem dated. But it's hard not to warm to a film in which a character's cry of "I can't feel my leg" earns the reply "Ain't nothing but a thang."